More than anything else there is in these essays the oozing through of the bitter but kindly cynicism of a disillusionised man of the world.  His essay, for instance, entitled “Vanity of Vanities,” is full of the sense of vanity of human effort.  And yet against the whole current of this tendency to despondency and despair, we have such an essay as “Are we Wealthy?” in which he declared the day of declamation has passed, but that all things are possible to organisation.  “In many respects it is a good world, but it might be made better, nobler, finer in every quarter, if the poor would only recognise wise and silent leaders, and use the laws which men have made in order to repair the havoc which other men have also made.”  But he reverts to the note of sad and kindly cynicism as he contemplates this supreme ironic procession of life with the laughter of gods in the background, even although he hastens to remind us that much may be made of it if we are wise.

These prose sermons by a tamed Berserker remind us somewhat of a leopard in harness.  But they are good sermons for all that, veritable tours de force considering who is their author and how alien to him was the practice of preaching.  His essay entitled “A Little Sermon on Failures” might be read with profit in many a pulpit, and “Vanity of Vanities” would serve as an admirable discourse on Ecclesiastes.  They illustrate the manysidedness of their gifted author not less than his sympathetic treatment of distress and want in “Men who are Down.”

These fragments snatched from the mass of his literary output need no introduction from me.  Mr. Grant Allen has written with friendly appreciation of the man.  I gladly join him in paying a tribute of posthumous respect and admiration to James Runciman and his work.

W.T.S.

SIDE LIGHTS.

I.

LETTER-WRITERS.

Since old Leisure died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence.  Dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited abandonment which we see in “Pickwick,” and the full geniality of his mind came out delightfully.  The letter in which he describes a certain infant schoolboy who lost himself at the Great Exhibition is one of the funniest things in literature, but it is equalled in positive value by some of the more serious letters which the great man sent off in the intervals of his heavy labour.  Dickens could do nothing by halves, and thus, at times when he could have earned forty pounds a day by sheer literary work, he would spend hours in answering people whom he had never seen, and, what is more remarkable, these “task"-letters were marked by all the brilliant strength and spontaneity